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I have an early 2008 Mac Pro and have two hard drives in it. The main system drive is a 2TB Western Digital drive I installed about a year ago. The 2nd drive is a 1TB Seagate drive which is the original drive that came with the Mac Pro.
When looking at Disk Utility a few days ago I realized the drive is showing up in Red and it's saying that SMART is failing. I've never had this happen before and like having a warning.

First Question:
When SMART shows up as failing can it be a false alarm or is it likely a definite sign of impending hard drive failure? When this happens, does the drive frequently fail quickly or does it take awhile? The fortunate thing is I back this drive up frequently to Time Machine.

Second Question:
What SATA speed does the Mac Pro handle? I see many hard drives that are 3.0GB/s and some that are 6.0GB/s. Does the Mac Pro handle the faster 6.0GB/s? If not, would they still work but just not at the additional speed?
I may consider upgrading to a 1.5TB or 2TB but figured I'll go with a Western Digital or Seagate drive. I see cache ranging from 16MB to 64MB and speeds at 5400RPM and 7200RPM. Between these two which is more important, large cache size or RPM's?

When failing appears you can be assured the drive is on the way out. How long it will take is like a piece of string. Your Mac Pro handles SATA II 3GB/sec transfer rates. As a rule of thumb the SATA III 6GB/sec will be backwards compatible but at the slower speed. Handy if ever you go to a faster computer.

Speed is the most important go with a 7200rpm drive. Seagate, WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Samsung,Toshiba all depends on the luck of the draw when you purchase a hard drive. Go for the one with the best warranty. Seagate were offering five years a while ago so search round their web sites.

HDD are at a premium right now because of severe flooding in Thailand where drives are made in most instances.

Hang on to those original install discs like grim death! Using OS X.7 or later make a bootable USB thumb drive before running Installer!

For what it is worth, for backup to SSD boot drive and Bootcamp, purchased a Velociraptor drive from OWC as they had some 600GB/300GB refurbished drives and at 10,000rpm it flies, but not as fast as the SSD of course.

Hang on to those original install discs like grim death! Using OS X.7 or later make a bootable USB thumb drive before running Installer!